Get’n Buffed – My Falcon Wagon Gets a Shine-on

Ford Falcon Wagon – Get’n Buffed

Crushed. Stopped dead and pissed. That’s how I’d describe myself following my first paint attempt on my 1963 Falcon Wagon.

The After shot of the inner quarter panel.

How should I feel? The bodywork sucked, there were foo-boos all over the place from a careless painter who’s been cheating everyone he meets since. But… that angry tone and deflated project is  almost completely back on track now! My wagon’s got a new coat of flat gold paint and the interior paint’s almost completely fixed thanks to my buddies at Infinite Detail.

I first met Jeff from Infinite cause he joined MyRideisMe.com and uploaded some pictures of his 1960 Falcon Wagon. I contact him and cried on his should some about the sorry state of my Falcon’s paint. He showed me his website and the “before and after” pictures and said, “Let me take a look.”

Soon after, Jeff and his brother-in-law Mike were over. They took a long look, then explained in great detail what they could and couldn’t do and offered a written quote. That kind of honesty and clarity about what they couldn’t do is the only reason I’m not completely done with the interior. Hey, they’re not magicians! One panel was so far gone, they just couldn’t bring it back.

These are the “Before”, nut wrenching shots of the runs. Here’s what a non-pro delivers (Click to see full size… and cry)

My goal for the paint was to repair, if possible the mile-long runs left in the inside quarter panels… on both sides. After that, all was gravy, but I wanted to see what the boys could do. In the pictures below, I tell the story about what they did and how they did it. No doubt – these guys are professionals and take as much time and care as any craftsmen I’ve ever seen. They freak’n resurrected my interior!

 

Let the guys from Infinite Detail take a look at your ride! If they can make crap paint look this good, imagine what they can do with good paint! It sure was a pleasure, and a relief, to work with Jeff and Mike. I can’t recommend their service any higher!

Gettin’ Started on my Ford Falcon

1960 Ford Falcon Project

I recently pulled my Ford Falcon into the garage with plans of figuring out what’s going on with it. This weekend I dug in and really enjoyed myself! For years, most wrenching days have had a deadline. When Studie was my only car I had to get things fixed right away, which meant some stressful times in the garage. This weekend’s job was nice and relaxing (albeit dirty!) Here’s what I did…

I began with a good solid de-greasing of the engine. Boy was this a messy job! Every inch of the engine and oil pan was covered in oil and grime. One can of engine gunk, one can of brake clean, a good amount of Purple Power, some wire brushes, a scraper, and a roll of shop towels later… The engine was clean but boy was I greasy!

Once the engine was clean, I figured a good place to start was the plugs. Not knowing the history of this engine, I have no idea what’s been done to it! As I pulled the plugs things didn’t look too bad until I got to spark plug #4.  Have you ever seen such an ugly looking plug?! It was handy that we’d just covered reading plugs at the last Gasoline Girls meeting – although it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that this plug is seriously messed up!

After all the plugs were out, I proceeded to do a compression test on the Ford straight six engine. For those of you out there who are wrenching beginners – compression tests are great, learn about them! They’re a simple way to take a “pulse” of your engine and will give you a picture of what’s going on in each cylinder.

Unfortunately, my Falcon’s compression test didn’t look so good. The 1960 Ford Falcon manual states that the compression of each valve should be 170 +/- 10 psi. As you can see from my notes, my Falcon is WAY off! Cylinder 1 being the worst with a mere 50 psi – not even a third of what it should be. The amazing thing is… this engine still ran! I drove it into my garage!

Now that I’ve got some solid information, I need to decide what to do next. I could just remove the head and investigate further. Or I could pull the entire engine out – anticipating that it isn’t only the head but the bottom-end too that needs work. Another option is my boyfriend’s favorite… pulling the engine and dropping in a Mustang 5.0 engine and transmission he has ready to go.

What do YOU think? Leave a comment and let us know!

 

Falcon Wagon Paint – This Time with Flat Clear

Flat Paint Job for my Ford Falcon Wagon

Finally. I don’t think I could have taken a longer path to get there, but at least it’s done. My Falcon’s wearing new paint and the flat sheen or “hot rod flat” I was going for came out great. Special thanks to T.C. at FinishMaster in Mesa, AZ for help with the paint and advice to make this happen. I also took advantage of advice from Kevin Tetz from “Trucks” TV show. Kevin helped me with 11 Tips for a Flat Paint Job and sorta held my hand on this project.

It’s a long story how I got here, you can read it all at this link: Falcon Wagon Build. It started with bodywork lessons and primer from Squeeg’s Kustoms then a paint job gone wrong. Back on track, here’s how my buddy Joel and I laid on this flat gold paint. I think it came out great!

Before Paint Prep:

You can see here what my wagon looked like right before we started on Saturday morning. Over Labor Day, my sons and I scuffed the clearcoat with 400 grit and/or scotch-brite so the new paint would stick and Joel did a little dent repair on the lower part of the fender. See it? You might also note that the fenders are a different color than the rest of the car. That’s why I’m repainting it! With this color, it’s next to impossible to match it.

Next came the tedious job or masking the car. Joel crawled up and over the partly-masked tailgate and taped up all the door seams. The interior paint, so far, is salvageable, and we’re not painting around the windows and in the engine compartment. The window area will be covered by trim and the engine compartment may end up black or we’ll leave it. Turns out the new paint matches the original better than the fender repaint did!

Here’s the final shot of the car before paint. Note the garage prep work. I didn’t cover the floor, but we wet it down between coats. Almost every wall was completely covered in visqueen and we had to crawl on the floor to get in the house for drinks and fresh air. I had a big fan with a too-ugly-to-photograph cardboard setup that held two filters for the incoming air. I had positive air pressure, or put another way, more air coming in than exhausting out through the two floor fans just out of sight. Let’s paint!

Basecoat, Basecoat Pearl then Flat Clear:

This is the primer sealer coat. This is also where we discovered that the SATA paint gun we were using wasn’t working right. If you read the Flat Paint Job tips one of the first thing Kevin Tetz said was to do a “sprayout” to test the paint and the process. Well, we didn’t. We flat ran out of time on Saturday so now it was Sunday and we both had to work Monday. We just went for it!

If we had tested the gun, we would have found air bubbles blowing up into the paint cup. Joel knew this was wrong, so a quick search on Google told us SATA guns need the paint nozzle to be very tight. Since we’d borrowed the gun, he was afraid to crank down on the nozzle, but then did. Problem solved, but not before blowing some pimer-boogers out onto the car. The air bubbles in the cup caused the paint to cure way too quickly. It was like mud cleaning the paint gun. OOPS!

Finally…. Color!

Not sure if this is the first or third coat of paint. (fumes were heavy that day my friends!) One thing I am sure of… I picked a killer color! After staring at the color book for way too long (like I do at a candy vending machine) I finally picked this color as the store was closing. I had a picture of champagne in a glass I was referencing and before the pearl, champagne is about the color seen here.

The three color basecoats were laid out in long lines: (picture Joel fast walking down the side of the car) first on the roof, then one side, then the hood, the other side, then the back. the first coat looked sorta splotchy, but Joel warned me about that. With the next coats, she laid down sweet and looked great in my newly installed lights.

Pearl: The Second Basecoat

(click to see these pictures full size)

Next was the pearl coat. I’ll have to hit up T.C. from FinishMaster for the exact specs on the gold pearl.  Got it! The pearl I used was the 1021s sunbeam gold pearl.

The pearl and the flat clear were the only two things I changed from the original paint job. The color and materials were all the same.

I learned though, that a pearl coat isn’t always in the clearcoat. I knew a pearl paint job was a “tri-coat” paint job, but I always thought it was two steps of clearcoat, one with pearl and the last without so the pearl “floats” above the paint. I’m sure that’s how it was done originally (to save money), but we followed FinishMaster’s advice and used a Chroma Color basemaker with a trick, Japanese made pearl T.C. was stoked on. It looked… creamy… in the can, but in the sun, it sparkled. You can see in the pictures above that the shine has changed. It’s hard to describe though… it went from a shine to a glow that became more subdued and slick when we laid down the flat clear.

We planned to lay down the pearl in two or three coats, depending on how it looked. (Again, another great endorsement for the test sprayouts) Turns out, we didn’t have to choose. We had just enough pearl to put two coats all over the car and a third on the roof, hood and all the curved parts of the car. (it gave my garage floor a nice sparkle too)

Flat Clear – How Flat is Flat Enough?

I’m skipping a few pictures here down to the finished, unmasked car. I could show what the car looked like after one, two or three coats of flattened clear, but you couldn’t tell the difference. I will explain what we used and how we mixed it:

The clear was Nason brand (DuPont’s economy brand) 465-00 High Image Urethane HS Clearcoat mixed with DuPont Plas-Stick 2360S Flexible Matting Additive. Those two were mixed with activator and reducer to make the finished, sprayable flat clear. The tech sheet had mixing instructions for three levels of flatness: Flat (0-5% gloss); Eggshell (20-30% gloss) and Semi-Gloss (50-60% gloss).

The first coat of flat clear was mixed up, by weight on my wife’s digital bread making scale (haha!), for eggshell. Eggshell was the plan all along… not totally flat, but somewhere right in the middle. Course that changed!

With the first coat of flattened clear down, we kicked back and watched it cure for about 30 minutes. The clearcaot had a different stink to it than the paint and made the floor sticky… and didn’t get “dry” to the touch as fast as everything else did. After waiting, we could tell the eggshell flatness was too shiny. The way we reasoned, it’d be better to have it too flat then almost shiny. “Almost glossy” would be like we tried to get shiny paint but failed.

Fearing the 0-5% flat clear would be too flat, I fell back on too much math in college and found middle ground between flat and eggshell.  Eggshell was 24% clearcoat and the “flat” was only 14.5% clearcoat. I mixed up a custom batch at 18% clearcoat with the matte clear (the matting additive), reducer and activator mixed at the same proportional ratio as they were: 20% reducer and 20% activator meant the matte clear was now 42% of the mix. 18+20+20+42 = 100% (ya with me?)

The final result is what you see here when I pushed her out into the morning sun for the first time:

I love it! You can tell we went for a hot rod flat look and the gold pearl just GLOWS in the low sun. I’ll push it out into the setting sunlight next to see how the golden light reflects off the gold pearl.

You like the flat paint? Let me know what you think.

Thanks again to my buddies at FinishMaster!

 

RHD Falcon Squire Wagon Groovy Video

1963 Ford Falcon Squire Wagon

Images Courtesy of Daniel De Silva

In case you didn’t know, Ford Falcons were made and sold in Australia while the “compact” Ford was selling in the USA too. The cool old Ford Falcons we enjoyed all through the 60′s were replaced with some 70s Falcons that looked like… cars from the 70s. In a word, YUCK. But that’s another story…

Daniel De Silva of Bandit Films has teamed up with Luke from Fuel Magazine to make Fueltank.tv. It’s a collection of great hot rod and custom car videos all done in HD. I’ve watched a few, especially this trick Falcon wagon, and I’ll be back!

Dig the groovy sounds and especially dig this gorgeous right hand drive Falcon. I want it!! Hopefully my 63 Falcon Wagon Project will turn out half as nice!

 

Back in the Garage with the 1960 Ford Falcon

As it ends up, Pikesan’s not the only one with a Falcon project on their hands. I’m ashamed to say it – but Davey, my 1960 Ford Falcon 2-door sedan, has been sitting on a side-yard gathering dust since I finished Studie’s transmission over a year ago. The above picture was taken at the last event, and come to think of it the only event, Davey ever attended – the Mooneyes 2010 Summer Show.

I had been depending on the Falcon to get me by while Studie was stranded with transmission issues. Falcon got me through, but just barely. Falcon had been giving me worries and semi-breaking down for a couple of weeks by the time Stude had gotten back on the road. The above picture was taken in October 2010 before I had a garage and had to find crafty ways to comfortably work! I was so happy to have my Stude back, and busy with a million other things in life, that Davey just sat… and sat some more. I intended to bring the Falcon over to my garage months ago, but it never seemed to happen.

The wait is over though, today was the day! And as it turns out…it was meant to be.

You see, as it turns out, today was Davey’s birthday! Here’s how I found out…

After driving the Falcon to my house from a couple blocks away (Davey started right up!) and giving him a bath, I opened the hood. Then I remembered what I had read in my original 1960 Ford Falcon shop manual about all the information the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) tells you. I ran inside to grab the manual and opened the driver’s side door to look at Davey’s VIN. Yes, of course, it’s a

2-door, Corinthian White, 6-cylinder sedan – I already knew that. But…what I didn’t know was that Davey was built in Lorain, Ohio on October 1st, 1960!! Happy 51st Birthday Davey! Even though I waited way too long, I think the time is just right to dive into putting Davey back on the road – even better then before!

I’m going to start with a basic tune-up and see what sort of issues come up. When Falcon got parked, I was having issues that seemed a little like overheating. After I had been driving for awhile (say on the freeway for 25 minutes) – the engine would die as soon as I came to a stop. I could start it back up, but it would die again every time I had to stop. I had added a temperature gauge that worked, but it showed the temp didn’t seem to be the problem. Also, the carb was newly rebuilt so I don’t think that’s the issue.

I’m venturing to guess it’s probably fairly minor repairs needed. But I’m very excited to get the chance to dive into this engine and do some learning – and getting to know Davey better!

What would you do first on a project like this? What sort of projects have been sitting around your place too long that need to be brought into the garage?? Speaking of garages – did you know that MyRideisMe.com is interactive!? Build a garage of your own to share your project and cars with others!

Next Page »